The Well and the Shallows

The Well and the Shallows, by G.K. Chesterton, originally published 1935, reprinted in 2006 by Ignatius Press.

 

The Well and the Shallows was one of the last books Chesterton published before his death, and though Chesterton is clearly upset with the state of the world, he still obviously believes that none of the ills plaguing society are irreparable.  This volume is a collection of short essays that Chesterton had previously published in various newspapers and journals. 

 

Although the essays cover a wide variety of topics, there are several common themes binding them together; ranging from religion to international politics, from institutionalized bigotry to scientific quackery.  One of the most pervasive themes is Chesterton’s belief that several powerful forces threaten to damage or even destroy what is good and just in the world.  Nazism, communism, corporate greed, thoughtless secularism, and several other trends are addressed with a tone that is both wary and rallying.

 

Chesterton opens with a statement that underlines the morality behind his writings, which compels him to flaunt public opinion and attempt to change minds,

            I have had, if I may say so, a very happy and lucky literary life; and have often felt rather the indulgence than the impatience of critics; and it is in a perfectly amiable spirit that I note that it has involved a certain transition or change.  Up to a certain point, I was charitably chaffed for saying what I could not possibly mean; and I was then rather more sharply criticized, when it was discovered that I did really mean it.  Now anybody driven to the defense of what he does really mean must cover all the strategic field of the fight, and must fight at many points which he would not have chosen in fancy, but only in relation to fact.

 

The recent Ignatius Press edition boasts an introduction by Dale Ahlquist, the President of the American Chesterton Society.  Ahlquist argues that this book does a great deal to bolster the contention that Chesterton possessed nearly prophetic powers, due to his amazingly prescient conjectures about ensuing political dangers and social follies.  Ahlquist observes that the heart of The Well and the Shallows is Chesterton’s belief that the Catholic Church manages to be right in regard to social, cultural, theological, and political issues where other ideologies and schools of thought are at best incomplete and at worst horribly misguided.

 

The title metaphors refer to the Catholic Church and the modern world of doubt and trendy theories.  The Catholic Church is the “well,” a deep and life-sustaining source.  Modernity and recent philosophies are the “shallows,” pools that may appear to contain rich and satisfying depths but which in fact only hold scant amounts of anything useful.  Chesterton muses on how so much effort and intellect go into crafting modern philosophies with such paltry returns, writing, “I do not deny that modern doubt, like ancient doubt, asks deep questions; I only deny that it provides gives any deeper answers. I will even concede the questions from what is called modern thought are often really deep, but I must conclude that the answers are often decidedly shallow. And perhaps it is even more important to remark that, while the questions are in a sense eternal, the answers are in every sense ephemeral.”

 

Though a substantial portion of the book is mainly religious in subject, Chesterton spends a lot of time on all sorts of other topics.  Economics and morality are covered in detail in the essay “Reflections on a Rotten Apple,” which Dale Ahlquist dubs one of Chesterton’s finest explanations of Distributism, an economic system devised by Chesterton and his friend Hilaire Belloc based on the encyclicals of the popes.  Sir Thomas More’s becoming a saint (an event that didn’t happen until the 1930’s, centuries after his death) is also discussed.  Politics, both domestic and international, figure increasingly prominently over the course of the book.

 

It is important to put Chesterton’s righteous indignation into historical context.  Though Chesterton’s warnings against Nazism sound prophetic today, it must be remembered that Chesterton was making himself unpopular by voicing the opinions he did.  The public was still sick of war after the First World War (then known as the Great War), and the spirit of appeasement, as well as the intellectually dishonest arguments of certain public figures, were working in tandem in order to help silence opinions like Chesterton’s.    (For a more in-depth look at Chesterton’s prescient thoughts on the upcoming fascist crisis in Europe, along with the socio-political climate that branded Chesterton’s honest warnings as anathema, please read Chesterton on War and Peace, an anthology consisting of Chesterton’s writings on the title subjects over the course of the twentieth century, recently collected and edited by Michael W. Perry).

 

Furthermore, Chesterton uses his pen as a sword in order to attack the pseudoscientific theories that would eventually be used to persecute and murder millions of Jews and other assorted ethnicities.  Eugenics, the belief that certain races were intrinsically superior to others and that certain actions (ranging from sterilization to incarceration) ought to be used in order to allow the propagation of “fit” races and the prevention of the expansion of “unfit” people, was becoming increasingly popular.  Here, Chesterton touches upon several themes that he expounded upon in his book Eugenics and Other Evils, especially just how dangerous it is to believe that certain types of people have no right to exist.

 

In a society that praises moral relativism and where believing one’s religion to be the only true one is dismissed as tacky, Chesterton declares that, “It may be incredible that one creed is the truth and the others are relatively false. At the same time, it is not only incredible, but intolerable, to believe that there is no truth in or out of the creeds, and all are equally false. For then nobody can ever set anything right, if everybody is equally wrong.”  Chesterton’s work is always directed by an unshakeable moral compass.

 

The essays in this volume are mostly quite short, so readers who are looking for easy and salutary reading will have much to delight them in this volume.  Even the most harried reader has the time to fit at least one of Chesterton’s little pearls into a busy day.  It is fortunate that the recent Ignatius Press edition contains several annotations, because as usual, Chesterton refers to several then-current events that will completely elude the average reader.  This makes the book not only an outstanding commentary on religion, but also a unique history of the intellectual, social, and political climate of pre-WWII England.

 

 

­–Chris Chan